Twitter Expert

I put out a piece on Saturday looking at Twitter growth rates on Labour List. I’ve had my own mini Twitter “lunge” over the weekend, so I’d post my own statistics before anyone else does it for me.

There are a couple of interesting points here:

The drop on 19th December was due to a worldwide clearout of spam “followers” by Twitter. There was quite a big drop at the Wardman Wire compared to some other political bloggers. I put that down to my long period of passive use of Twitter since I joined in June 2008, and also to my having one foot in the technology niche.

The steady growth resumed after the drop, then increased again around the 10th January. That was when I added the “Social Networking” graphic to the top of the sidebar, which suggests that - for the Wardman Wire with our audience of roughly 1000 unique visitors a day and the existing audience mix - these graphics are adding 1-3 Twitter followers a day on top of the underlying “natural” rate.

My excuse for the “lunge” last weekend is that I am writing an E-Book: How you can make Twitter Fly, and have done some catching up. The jump in growth is due to my following bloggers I recognise on Twitter, and “auto-followbacks” which are used by some UK new services.

Anyway, this E-Book should be coming soon …

The aim is to publish the E-Book in a few days for a competitive price, and have an initial promotional period when it is available for free to followers of my Twitter feed. I’m also thinking about starting an email newsletter about the technical side of political blogging.

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